The cave started out as a joke. Driving along on a New Mexico back road, we saw a sign: Experience Darkness, 1 Mile. Then a mile later: True Silence Here
“Shall we?” I asked Evelyn (she called herself Eva-Luna). “True silence seems appropriate.”
We’d been driving all day—or I had. Eva-Luna still hadn’t spoken. I was tired of the silence more than the driving.
The desert in its persistence can also wear on you. At night, the stars are like braille in your mind—the sinister wind whispers or howls. By day, against the colorless sky, every object stands out, the saguaros like giant green men. Sturdy, thorny, intimidating—each has a look, you know what he’s thinking, the way you do if you see a man in a field, his position gives him away. The despairer with dipped head, celebrant with arms wide, dreamer or drunkard, unshaven face to the sky, wife-beater with sticks at the ends of his arms, maybe a belt, head bent, listening. If you’ve ever been a kid, you know what that means. Saguaros are an army of slow, angry men, alive in the emptiness.
The entrance to the cave looked no more than seven feet high—no fancy lights or neon signs; no ticket office or souvenir shop. Just one scruffy old man on a bench, wearing dusty clothes and a headlamp, drinking—he put the whole head of the bottle in his mouth.
“Maybe this isn’t such a good idea,” I said.
“In for a penny,” said Eva Luna. First words in two days.
***
Eva-Luna is married to my ex-husband, whom I loved— love— yet left. It was the hardest thing I ever did; lying in bed, my whole being swollen with sorrow, listening to the phone ring till I couldn’t bear it. I felt, come to think of it, as if I were trapped in an echoing cave.
When Leo and I had known each other a year, sporadically and feverishly— we were mad for each other— we went to Paris to the French electronics show. He designed expensive equipment for listening to music and I was music editor of a small magazine. On the plane, he asked me to marry him. It would mean giving up a job I liked and was good at, and moving across the country. But . . . if I loved him?
***
The question is, what is love? I was 50 when I met Leo, and had known and “loved” several men. Thirteen, to be exact. Loved. Hungry for them, the sex, the reassurance. Not an uncommon addiction for the children of alcoholics. Love is a hunger, an itch, as from Deianira’s poison robe— insatiable and burning.
***
The old cave-man was about a hundred and his craggy face seemed to promise that True Silence might bring something valuable. He said very little. No explanations. No promises of wonders to come.
I paid the ten dollars and Eva-Luna and I were given rusty headlamps. We were shown how to put them on and work the switches. Then we set out.
For all his wrinkles and bent legs, our guide moved briskly, tapping the rock path with a stick. Each tap rang like a bell. We went into the earth under the sign that said Entrada.
I’d never been in a cave; I don’t like enclosed spaces. Eva-Luna was muttering about how we’d go to the big one, Carlsbad, Carl Is Bad, and see towers of shining white lime and frozen waterfalls. At least she was talking.
We walked and walked, the stone between the curving walls smooth beneath our feet, as if polished by an underground river a million years ago. Tap-tap went the stick. A gray sound. Tap tap. Gray gray. No words. The cool air blowing out of the underworld smelled of metal mixed with dirt and blood. My skin began to tighten.
We bury bodies under the ground, and there they rot. The Buddhists have a test of the spirit where the novice has to watch a corpse decompose and note the daily changes. A human corpse.
***
I didn’t accept Leo’s proposal till we were in our cheap hotel the next night. We were making love and I said, If we’re going to do these dotty things, we probably ought to be married. Two days later, we wed in the Bureau de quelque chose in the City of Light. At our “matrimonial supper,” Leo, whom I’d never seen with a drink, was suddenly dead drunk— insisting that his designs were being stolen by his French agent, screaming at me to translate accurately, you stupid twit, you are helping that bastard cheat me! We were invited to leave the restaurant. The sweet funny man I loved had morphed into a monster.
After a week, I finally stopped denying reality. We were back in the airplane on the way home. Leo was still drunk. How had I been such a fool? Until our marriage— if you can call it that— he really hadn’t touched a drop in my presence. He’d say, I’m not much for the grape, bugs piss in it. He’d drink seltzer while I sipped Chardonnay. He was meticulous in dress and manner. But look, my spider sense whispered, his shirts and sweaters have those faint stains.
Do warnees ever listen? I was half a century old, the child— long ago— of two drunks. I guess I don’t self-preserve very well.
At Kennedy Airport, we tore up the French marriage papers and Leo left for California. A month later, he married Eva-Luna, 24— about half his— our— age, and brought her to my magazine offices in New York. Leo, with his little crooked smile and funny broken nose; the man I loved.
He presented his newest, hottest amplifiers and spent the day (sober) locked up with his new wife and the publisher. The Loussier trio and the wonders of jazzed Bach shook the walls till I trembled. I went home, put in earplugs, and wept for a week.
And that was the last I saw of Leo, the first and last of Eva-Luna, until she called me.
***
Our little lamps made a narrow path. The taps led us on and on. A few feet ahead was—nothing. From which our forward movement created—something. The skin on my arms developed tiny thorns and pricked. That’s called piloerection or horripilation—your skin crawls. But it’s also the feeling you get just before you reach the cusp of orgasm. Or throw up your breakfast.
The farther we went, the more horripilical or whatnot I got. I was sweating, yet the air was now definitely cold. I’ve read that below a certain depth under the earth, the temperature is a constant 68 degrees, with perfect humidity. Conditions for the ripening of fine wine and the mummification of flesh.
Our guide stopped and Eva-Luna almost ran into him. He was pointing his stick at two canvas chairs in the center of a large chamber. More a hole in the earth with two chairs suspended, the strange effect of a spotlight.
Siéntate! We sat. He gestured to our headlamps, and, reluctantly, we turned them off. When in the beam of his own light, he shook his hand impatiently, we gave them up. He said again, “Siéntate.”
And like obedient puppies, we sat, watching him walk away. A fog of silence swallowed us.
Why did we do this? Why didn’t we refuse to hand over our lights and demand to be taken out? Why didn’t we run screaming after him as his light grew dimmer and smaller, and the walls got closer together and pressed on us— gradually growing grayer and darker until we were in black silence. Black black black.
“Jesus!” I whispered. I didn’t reach for Eva-Luna’s hand, but it was a struggle. I felt the way I did when I was five and my mother, against my frantic promises never to lie again, turned out the bedroom light and locked the door. I was to “reflect on my character.” And listen for monsters. And wait. And wait. And wait.
When I was older, darkness became more of a blank page. I could make myself do what I wanted and needed. You can hum, talk to yourself. Sing the saddest songs you know. You can turn on the flashlight under the covers, the overhead light, even, no matter what your mother says— strike a match. To hell with everything.
When I left for college, I never went back.
***
The cave was filling with ghosts. Subsonic sounds. Flashing lights— was the old man coming back? Or someone, something, else? For Christ’s sake: we were bait. Goats the hunter ties out to lure the lions.
Neon swirls started at the far corner of my eye and slipped upward, and outward . . .
“Do you hear something?” Eva-Luna’s voice, sibilant and harsh.
A rushing sound? Water? It stopped. I felt a scream rising in my throat. If it was water, how could it stop?
We were holding hands.
“Why did you come?” she asked suddenly, her voice rang. “I don’t mean this cave.”
She’d called me, had she forgotten? Since we hadn’t talked much, we could both have forgotten a lot of things.
***
This is Eva-Luna.
The phone line chittered, like an irritated insect.
Help me. Please? She stammered, she choked. She was in Houston. In a hotel. She’d left LA, left Leo, gone home to Mama. But she was now on her way back to him and she’d fallen to pieces. “I have pills. I do and don’t want to take them. He does and doesn’t want me back— I do and don’t want to go.”
“Is he drinking?”
Why didn’t I just hang up?
Well, part of me felt vindicated— what a potent drug that is. But also part of my heart, as they call it, had gone out to her. When Leo brought her to the magazine offices, she didn’t femme-fatale it over me. She looked embarrassed, clinging to him like a pet monkey— I half expected to see her on his shoulder, holding onto his head. I heard Leo say to the publisher that she was the only female audio engineer in the world and her ideas were going to revolutionize the music business. I laughed. No one, certainly not this little marmoset, was going to cause a ripple in the old-boy cannibalism of high-end audio.
“What do you want me to do?”
But making the call had drained the last drop of her. I managed to get that she’d bought an old VW Beetle and rebuilt the engine at Mama’s; she was driving back to California. But in Houston, her mind and body blew a tire, fried a fuse, ran out of gas, and popped a gasket. For ten days, she’d been lying in a hotel room with the TV on. Hadn’t eaten, slept, or showered. It was as if someone had kidnapped her and thrown her in a hole.
“I’m dying!”
“What hotel are you dying in?”
She told me and hung up.
I called right back. “Goddammit, hang up again, and I’ll beat the shit out of you.”
“You’ll come?”
I’d sort of said it, hadn’t I?
“I’ll buy you the ticket. I have money. I think I have money—”
“And meet me at the airport?”
No answer.
“Okay! But if I get there and you’ve taken those pills, I’ll wring your damn neck.”
I went to my publisher and took two weeks off.
“Rather sudden,” he said.
“Yeah. Family emergency.”
She didn’t meet me, of course.
She was a true wreck. Smudgy gray face, greasy hair, gray bags under her eyes. The shakes. She stank. “Are you drinking?”
But the smell wasn’t alcohol. “Did you take pills?” But the smell wasn’t medicine-y, either. Pure unwashed female flesh.
The only thing she said aloud was, Who the hell am I?
On her visit to the magazine, she’d been nymph-like. Glowing, young. Stylish silk slacks and shirt, long shining hair, expensive make-up. A beautiful plump little monkey on Leo’s back. Now the hair was stringy, she was bone thin, lips chewed. The clothes scattered over the floor and chairs were leather and metal chains. She had a metal whatsis in her lower lip, which looked infected.
Without a word, I picked her up like a three-year-old, and carried her to the bathroom. I took out the lip thing and washed her face. Peeled the limp clothes off her arms and legs, sat her in the tub, bathed her, washed her hair; it looked as if she’d pulled hanks of it out of her skull.
Finishing with the front, I stood her up against the wall, and washed her backside.
Then I dried her and draped her on the bed. I’d say she was limp as a baby, but babies are about as limp as a scalded cat.
Why do we do this to ourselves?
A man. Never a poem, painting, hot job. Always a man.
I called room service and ordered half the menu. “Eat, or I’m calling an ambulance.” For a day, I fed her little spaced-out glops. I made her drink milk. Then, since I was the one who stank now, I took a long shower. When I came out, she was sitting on the floor cross-legged, holding nail scissors, locks of hair scattered over the rug.
She was not beautifully bald; she was a hedgehog. I went down to the hotel shop, bought a Norelco clipper and buzzed off the rest.
It took three days to get her half-way human and into the blue rebuilt VW, heading to LA— which, she said, was what she wanted.
I drove. All this time, she’d said nothing of herself and Leo, nothing at all, except again, to herself, “Who am I?” She was the same kind of prisoner of love that I was.
I asked no questions, made no explanations of my own. What could I have said of the least interest to either of us? I’ve yearned for silent rescue myself a time or two. Someone, something, to tell you to breathe.
As the highway unrolled, she began to move, eat, make little sounds. Without hair to balance it, her head wobbled. She whispered something about Mama—clearly a you’ve-made-your-bed number, then motorcycles. Before she ran off, she’d bought a brand-new “hog”—not a Poland China, but a Harley-Davidson. She’d metamorphosed from nymph to butch.
Some details leaked in. Leo’s son Simon had arranged an “intervention” and made Eva-Luna help him.
“Leo’s in a san?”
No. Their “guide” for the intervention had locked Leo in with them to rage throughout the meeting, and then trundled him off to rehab. As soon as he was sober enough to stand, he’d hauled his ass out of there, come home, accused Eva-Luna and his son of betraying him, smashed a lot of dishes, furniture, records, and disappeared.
“Floating in a bottle, washing up on a foreign shore?”
“What am I without him?”
“A brilliant engineer? A woman? A contradiction in terms?”
***
The smell in the cave was beginning to choke me. Metal. Cold. Stone dust. Nasty on my tongue—rot. Coming, I discovered, from my armpits, and because I’d peed my pants, my crotch. I itched to claw my way out; probably would’ve wound up dead, only Eva-Luna had my arm now in an iron grip.
“Shit,” I said. “We’ve traded one darkness for a worse one. What—or who, if anyone—is coming to get us?”
I was overwhelmed with the feeling that I’d crawled in the dark, along the floor, into a crevice, crawling because I couldn’t bear not to, pushing, clawing, the tunnel getting smaller and smaller instead of opening, until at last I couldn’t move at all, trapped there in my head, to suffocate.
The swirling colors and the water sounds were back, morphing into blood spilling out of our hearts into shark-infested grottos. Eva-Luna was digging holes in my wrist with her powerful engineer’s fingers. I was fighting not to sob and shake.
Who the hell was I? The prisoner in this cave.
After a while, when my breathing evened out a bit, she loosened her fingers and began to stroke my arm. Not back and forth, but softly, stroking a cat the way the fur grows, from just above my elbow down to where my fingers began. Then a thrust between the fingers. It was electrifying: all those little frightened cells lining up and being tricked into cooperation.
I felt her lips on my palm. “Somebody told me when women fuck the same man, they’re really trying to fuck each other,” she whispered.
“I heard the opposite—in fucking each other, the women are trying to possess all of the man.”
She went back to stroking my arm, but it was making me crazy so I eased myself away.
I wanted to ask her, crudely, “When you make love with Leo, do you come?” I hate that word. But trying to negotiate “orgasm” in a conversation is as hard as the actual phenomenon for me. I choke off the word, choke off the sensation. I told Leo I’d never had an orgasm.
“Ever?”
“I can do it myself.”
And he tried. Bravely and with ingenuity. We’d sit in the tub together, me with a scarf around my eyes, and he’d touch me, slowly, everywhere. Or we’d lie in the dark and I’d suddenly feel his electric tongue. My body slammed shut. Smarter than my brain, it seems. Assuage one hunger, and away goes life, down the drain.
There in the dark, I began to run my hands all around my face, my body, the chair. Aluminum frame, sturdy canvas material. A side pocket! And in it, a small bottle of liquid. I unscrewed the top and sniffed. Put a drop on my finger and tasted. Water. Hoping it wasn’t drugged, I drank half and handed the bottle to Eva-Luna. I felt in the other pocket and found a box of matches. No, a box with one match. I lit it carefully and stared into Eva-Luna’s face. All eyes and fuzz.
The match burnt my fingers. A minute later, I heard her glugging away. She’d found the water in her chair, too. She didn’t offer to share.
All at once, she yelled something. I still couldn’t see anything except the flare of the match on my retina.
“A light!” She shook my arm. And sure enough, here came a bright spool of light that didn’t skitter off or fade, but grew and grew, igniting bits of stone wall and ceiling. Gray. Cold. Silent. But no longer true dark.
Who— what— was coming? I was crying. I shut my eyes, and under the lids swam Van Gogh sunflowers and blue irises. Flaming stars. A severed ear. The museum at the end of the world.
***
“Señoras!” Our old guide, hobbling, jabbering, tapping, headlamp juddering. I bit my lip till it bled. I wanted to scratch his fucking eyes out. He didn’t sell us to white-slavers, but what if he’d died out there? How long before our corpses rotted away or mummified? How far down would we have dug ourselves, trying to find our way out? And no Buddhist neophyte to record the progress. “Jesus!”
“The devil you say,” Eva-Luna said. And suddenly we were choking with laughter. Harshly like frogs. And crying.
We got back to the Beetle, and it wouldn’t start. I didn’t flood it; the starter wasn’t working. What irony! We’d been as good as dead and somehow wormed our way out of hell, only to sit in the desert and dry up like moths.
But that awful bell of silence had shattered. I yelled, “Lady Bug, Lady Bug, Fly Us Away Home!”
Eva-Luna said, “Like all females, this one’s flat on her back with her feet in the air.”
She got in the driver’s seat and I pushed the car. There was the tiniest of dips in the dirt road, and Bless Sweet Mary, the car rolled, the engine coughed into life. My cheek was right on the rear bumper, that poor little engine nearly deafened me.
She drove. I didn’t even offer. She’d caught my share of energy and we were once more surfing the sand. When we got to Phoenix, we hadn’t said a word. A garageman replaced the starter.
***
We had one, maybe two, days before we reached LA. Eva-Luna kept driving.
I said, “Okay, I want some answers. Why am I here?”
“You lied to me.”
“So what?” (I lied in this writing too, dear reader. We are not what we want to be, or not very often.)
She pressed her lips, stared at the road.
After a moment, I said, “I lied when I told you I hadn’t seen Leo since we got back to Kennedy from France. I saw him—”
True darkness? Lying really is an addiction, you know. I ached to say I saw him once. But no. In for a penny, as Evaluna had said. “First at the Vegas electronics show, not long after you visited the magazine. He asked me to come back to him. I said no.”
Half a mile of silence.
“It ripped me up all over again.”
“Ripped you up!”
More silence.
“The second time, I flew to Burbank, called him from the airport. He picked me up and drove to a motel. I wanted to go to your house, meet you properly, I said. Make peace. But he knew I didn’t mean it. I didn’t have the moxie to just rent a car and show up.”
Another half mile.
“He came to the motel that night— we made love. Tried to. It was something we always did so well. Half-asleep and fucking, we were soul-mates. But he said I’d made him impotent. He cried.” Yes, I was lying. Didn’t tell her I’d always been impotent.
Her knuckles on the steering wheel were white.
“I left. I couldn’t have kept myself away from your house. I would’ve shown up, howling and raving. You’d have had to shoot me. Sic your dog on me. I caught a cab back to LAX and the red-eye home.”
Well, some lies there, too. But little ones.
***
Arizona is a beautiful place, but I saw only the gray concrete highway with yellow stripes in the middle. She drove. I slept, she drove, I slept some more. Then I drove, she slept, I drove.
Between us there was that third big lie.
That evening, in the safe droning of the car and the road, she said, “I’ve wanted to be a sound engineer all my life. Not a musician, but the person who invents the marvels so you hear the real thing anywhere, any time, and as if you’re there. Absolut. Music sinking into your cells, at your will. He hired me to do that. But when we got home from your magazine, I knew the rest of it was finished. I cut my hair, burned all my girlie clothes. To shock him. And he never even noticed.” She shot me a look. “He wouldn’t fuck me. Said he couldn’t. Because of you.” She blew out a breath. “Those two hot amplifiers were my designs. He was drinking so he couldn’t even hold a soldering iron.”
“The idea?” I asked, slyly.
She shook her head. “Yeah, some. But the solution was mine!”
I must be crazy because I started right then thinking how to interview her for the magazine. A woman engineer in the Boys Club, a Dame in Toyland?
“I could be a consultant for you, at the magazine,” she said. “Your music writers don’t know an amp from an ohm. You need authenticity.”
“Music is authentic. Amps and ohms are not.”
“But you, the listener, have to control it. Like a musician. You give attention.”
Silence for a few miles.
“Leo paid me good money. I could do what I liked. I bought my Harley. I go out all night, party with the Angels, flog the Harley, top speed. But come nine ack emma, I’m in the shop. Working.”
“So now what?”
“We’re still married— at least I guess we are. Are you married legally if you never fuck? What does the law have to do with marriage anyhow?”
I shrugged. “As long as you want it, nothing, I guess. It’s when you don’t. Did you know that his second wife, whatshername—”
“—she of the luscious golden tits and raven locks?”
“She cut off all her hair, and went to live with a woman.”
She stared at me. “How do you know?”
“He told me, of course. Damn it, you lunatic, watch the road!”
***
So he drank and drank. Cursed and threatened, broke things. Worse, she said, than he’d ever been, worse than when Simon was little. Back then, he’d been a working drunk. Now, he disappeared for days.
“One time he came home with a starving dog. My Ollie. I love my Ollie. I put him in a dog place; told them I’d be back for him. My god—how long have I been gone? Will they still have him?”
I shrugged.
“It wasn’t one of those places that kill your dog if you don’t show up for ten days.”
“Why didn’t you leave him with Leo?”
Nobody laughed.
“He started driving drunk and nearly killed a kid. That’s when we did the intervention; it was that or jail. Simon is the one who says this is your fault, by the way. The drinking, the falling apart.”
“What do you say?”
“I knew you’d come if I called.”
We went on, details, details. But after that first violent heartsmash, you have long years, a lifetime, to live with silence, boredom. Shame. And the never-ending incidents.
At some point, I said to her, “Why do you think we’re drawn to these men?”
“Because we have a monster inside just aching for them.”
***
We hit LA and Eva-Luna pulled into a Pollo Loco and we ate crazy chicken. Leo introduced us both to it.
She said, “Okay. Decision time. Stay or go. Yeah, you.”
“Three-some? Drunken, gender-neutered sex parties?”
She pulled a pack of Camels— unfiltered— from under the car seat, lit one, looking at me over the two streams of smoke from her nostrils. Closed her eyes, sighed. “Ah. I’ve been denying myself. It’s okay.”
“And you?”
“Who knows? Better.” She smiled. “Hey, is he ever going to be just a drunk?”
Her eyes were clear. Clear-er. Her face was still drawn, Tiggy-Winkle hair. She ran her free hand over the soft prickles, like Jean Seberg in Joan of Arc.
Okay. The third lie. While she was asleep that first night in Houston, I ran my fingers over the fuzz, so soft and hard all at once, like a baby lion. They look so cute, then they wake up and shred you.
When it looked like the horripilic thing was going to wake us both up, I stopped. I was that close.
***
Near the airport, she pulled into a shopping mall where a kite salesman, with a booth and one of those wind machines, was flying giant bird- and bat-shaped kites. They fluttered, straining at their leashes. So gorgeous. An eagle, a vulture, a bat, a goose—the major sacred fliers.
That’s what was missing from our cave. Bats!
We stood looking at the kite-man and his creatures. A group of small children gathered, all of us looking up, mouths open.
Eva-Luna held up her hand. The kite-man raised his eyebrows.
“Pick one,” she said to me.
So I pointed at the vulture. Her wings were long and black, her head the color of blood. She didn’t pull and jerk at her leash, she soared and turned through the bright air that is her home.
The kite-man gently reeled her in, wrapped her in newspaper, tied it with string, like a mummy. Then Eva-Luna pointed at the bat, and he wrapped that too. She dug into her leather jeans and pulled out a wad of cash.
“Hundred each.”
I started to say Whoa, that’s a fortune. But she was holding out the money and he was handing her the mummies.
“Ladies, promise me you’ll fly ’em,” he said. “They’re eleven-millimeter carbon tubing and rip-stop nylon. Don’t keep ’em shut in. They’re born to fly.”
Back in the car, Eva-Luna said, “We had to get the bat. Why didn’t you pick it, I’d have only had to buy one!”
“Screw you!”
She laughed. “Leo told me you know birds. What’s this one?”
“Vulture. Never the killer, she cleans battlefields after war, conducts souls to the sky. She doesn’t judge, she’s got no voice. No sound. The Tibetans offer their dead on platforms for her delectation—ancient goddess of the Underworld who eats our bodies and silently rids Earth of pollution.”
She lit another cigarette. “More of your entertaining lies?”
“No. Fact. And she’s got her work cut out for her, hasn’t she.”
Our reflections in the car windows showed us, not kindly vulture and bat, but two wild, disheveled Harpies, claws, beaks, burning eyes in the smoky blue enclosure.
Twenty minutes later, we were at LAX and Eva-Luna let me out. She thanked me, formally. “I’m off to make a deal with Simon,” she said and peeled away from the curb.
***
I took the vulture as carry-on (too bad no one was there to enjoy the pun), and once safely back in my life, I attached her to a flag pole in my yard overlooking the Sound. I’d leave for work, noting the wind and how it played with her. And return at night to listen to her wings, thrumming with every breath against the pole. Light wind, stormy wind, howling ocean wind. The song of the dark.
Five years.
Tonight, it’s different. I find myself listening to the wind as it whips her and rips at my shirt. What did I do, marrying Leo, leaving Leo, “rescuing” Eva-Luna? Coming home as if I hadn’t changed?
I always fall for people who know more than I do. Possessors of secrets and skills. Yet need my help to “succeed in the world.” An editor is like the vulture, a clean-up, you put the shine on someone’s true, gripping work, you polish the bones. You reach into them, to the marrow and beyond—till you scrape the back wall.
Eva-Luna’s cave-born determination paid off, by the way. She’s now designer and co-owner with Simon. Did I help her? Did she help me?
We don’t communicate. There’s that thin line between gratitude and loathing.
And in the cave, my head blasted into a million pieces, as silently as if I’d been hit by a sniper.
Snip snip, the wings whirl apart. The bones— metal, hollow— clatter away on the gale. Feathers stream away, ashes into the sky.
Sallie Reynolds is 85, and lives back of beyond in Northern California with her painter-writer-mechanic husband, a grand dog, and two hawks (she’s a licensed falconer). She had to live this long in order to become a whole human being. Her stories are here and there, and her two novels can be found on Amazon.
Featured Artwork:
The Space Inside
Susan L. Lin is a Taiwanese American storyteller who hails from southeast Texas. She has an MFA in Writing from California College of the Arts. Her novella GOODBYE TO THE OCEAN won the 2022 Etchings Press novella prize, and her short prose and poetry have appeared in over fifty different publications. Find more at her website.